Blues Buzz gains traction, looks to expand

Junior P.J. Cox’s St. Louis Blues news website has been all the buzz lately, with its Twitter account reaching over 1,100 followers and the website having nearly 3,000 views; the site’s publicity gained Cox the opportunity to begin writing about the Blues for Arch City Sports, a local sports news page. Cox hopes to monetize the website soon by posting advertisements to the page.

Cox’s page, Blues Buzz Blog, is a blog that he posts articles to, both opinionated and objective. The website is located at bluesbuzzblog.com and the Twitter account is @bluesbuzzblog.

The first thing Cox covered for this season was the prospect camp, where he met esteemed NHL.com correspondant Louie Korac, who covers the Blues for the site. Korac gave Cox his email via which he and Cox corresponded about how to start the blog.

The site began as a Twitter page where Cox planned to live tweet games, provide injury updates, and tell the occasional joke, but midway through the summer, Cox realized that a website would be a good medium for him to post in-depth articles about players, trades, and game recaps.

“I’ve been a Blues fan since I was a little kid,” said Cox. “And I’ve always loved to write. I’ve never really missed a Blues game; I’m always watching them, and I like tweeting about them too, but my regular followers on my Twitter aren’t really engaged in the Blues.”

Cox has been meeting with economics teacher Kevin Foy about how to best approach starting a site like this. Foy plans to put Cox in touch with someone that he knows who can offer him some advice and expertise.

“I’ve got some pretty serious hopes for it,” said Foy. “He’s already got a bunch of followers; people are interested in what he’s doing. I’m not a huge hockey fan, but based on (Cox’s) description, it sounds like it’s a relatively underserved market. I know that things like this definitely exist in other markets, other cities, other sports.”

Cox has also employed the help of fellow junior Peter Hempstead to help with the blog by live-tweeting the games.

“We have to have a way to get our articles out there, and one way to do that is by linking them to tweets,” said Cox. “And that’s great because it brings everyone that is following us—which is over 1,000 people—onto our website.”

Because of his work on the Blues Buzz Blog, Cox gained the attention of an editor of Arch City Sports, Mick Lite, who asked P.J. if he’d be willing to write articles for Arch City Sports as well. Cox agreed. At Arch City Sports, Cox has been working with Tyler Murry, who is currently a journalism student at University of Missouri.

“It’s pretty fun,” said Cox of working for Arch City Sports.

The next step in the building of the site is being able to monetize his work by posting advertisements to the page. Cox is in the process of speaking with local companies that want St. Louis Internet traffic because his page has that to offer.

“If I can land five companies that want to buy advertising on my website, then I can go from there knowing (the page) is going to be a success,” said Cox when asked of his concrete goals for the site’s profits this season. “It’s an investment of my time rather than money.”

Cox sees much more than just covering the Blues in his plan for the site; he hopes for it to turn into an ESPN-like service that provides both objective and opinionated articles dealing with the Blues, the Cardinals, the Rams (fingers crossed), and Mizzou sports as well. The site is currently working on setting up a YouTube account as well.

“It’s exciting because it’s pretty scalable,” said Foy. “So, once he comes up with a formula to make it work for the Blues, he can do the same thing for the Cardinals, he can do the same thing for other hockey teams if he wants to stay in that arena. He can pick up other sports, basically anything that has a buzz.”